Is it to escape the mundanity of your everyday life?
Is it to visit new places to expand your intellectual, emotional and cultural horizons?
Is it to visit old places to relive memories of bygone days?
Is it just to challenge yourself to go to a new place and survive the experience?
Is it so that you can update your Facebook status and show pictures of your visit to friends and family?

I'm extremely fond of archaeology, history and culture and visiting ancient places is always fascinating to me. I love to spend hours in a museum soaking in my perception of the era and trying to map out where I fit into the grand scheme of human cultural existence - ...till the tour guide tells me that's its time to leave as the group has to make it to the next destination before lunch so that we can visit the destination after that before 4PM because it would be open only until sundown since the local government did not have the necessary funds to maintain the lighting of such a large area.....

And I angrily curse to myself "...damn tourists"
Travelling to me evokes a strong response of expansion, learning and a grand sense of purpose. I've learnt that one can do more travelling in one square kilometer of a small town than in visiting all the hotspots in a large city provided one knows how to really use their senses to absorb, interpret and assimilate the new place.

One might have traveled to every city in the world but have not grown even a bit but a mere laundry man might have greater insights into the human condition constantly visiting the same set of houses day in and day out. If you're of the first kind please do us all a favour - stop wasting fuel, you're polluting the environment needlessly.

Re 1 doesn't seem to have much value these days. Beggars re-beg at me when I give them a
1 Rupee Coin, the bus conductor no longer deals with odd numbers for change and the price of a half coffee got upped from Rs.5/- to Rs.6/-, Rs.8/- or Rs.10/-

But there is one object that still stands tall in the land of the 1 Rupee Coin - The Matchbox.

The matchbox stands tall as probably THE commodity that provides the most value for money in the Indian market. Densely packed, there are at least 30 matchsticks in a matchbox! I am regularly asked to procure these for my smoking friends and the amount of value 1 matchbox brings never ceases to amaze me. Fire, being one of mankind's greatest friends finds its origin in modern life largely with the matchbox. Smokers use its contents to light cigarettes, slum dwellers to light their kerosene lamps and EVERYBODY uses them to bring light during blackouts.

I've been accused of over thinking many times in my life (and believe that people's accusations are true) but I've grown to realize that life would probably worse off without "over thinking". Sure I've made mistakes, but it is the same over thinking that probably led Einstein to develop his theory of relativity, the Buddha to come up with Buddhism or even tech geeks to write better code with a constant quest for "more".. its also the same cold hard belief in logic that urges a person to look for answers while navigating the far reaches of one's own soul and not give in to temptations along the way. Ask any addict.

Most people however don't seem to have a problem with that. Issues arise when dealing with thinking about seemingly mundane things - why are there small brush like things on escalators, why a phone call or text message wasn't returned or why a special friend dumped someone.

Here's the deal with thinking. Its fundamentally a judging function used to judge, conclude or resolve. When the end of a train of thought is usually a conclusion how can one over overdo it? The problem lies not in over thinking rather in incorrect thinking.

Over thinking is usually plain to see when the explanations needed to propose a conclusion seem to loop around one another or extend outward in ever increasing possibilities seemingly leading nowhere.

In that case:

1. Examine your premises - you've assumed something wrong

2. Take no prisoners - retrace all your trains of logic

3. Most importantly, have the courage to say "I don't know"- Insufficient information in my experience is the most common cause of the disease of "over thinking"

Coming back to Maynard James Keenan, thinking and analyzing are powerful tools we need to make our lives happy. When used well they bring clarity, a sense of sureness and stability that intuition or feeling can never provide. Every human being needs peace of mind and security before he can explore his or her feelings and intuitions.

Look at the chair you are sitting in, the clothes you are wearing or the communication device you are reading this from. You need to thank somebody's obsessive thought process for bringing them to you. The manager's drive to constantly improve the supply chain to reduce costs, the retailer's to increase sales and even your accountant's who strives hard to see that you have money to procure these things. Sometimes, over thinking could even kick in powerful unconscious intuitions leading to major discoveries as when Kekule discovered the structure of Benzene!